Aura and Authenticity in the Blair Witch Project

The 1999 faux-documentary The Blair Witch Project achieves its power though one all-important farce; that its audience believes – or can be persuaded to believe – that the film is ‘real’. This fascination with film mimicking life can be traced to many human art forms and the subjectiveness of that ‘reality’ is something that theorists continue to struggle with. In his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Walter Benjamin claims “...for the first time – and this is the effect of the film – man has to operate with his whole living person, yet forgoing its aura. For aura is tied to his presence; there can be no replica of it. The aura which, on the stage, emanates from Macbeth, cannot be separated for the spectators from that of the actor. However, the singularity of the shot in the studio is that the camera is substituted for the public. Consequently, the aura that envelops the actor vanishes, and with it the aura of the figure he portrays.” Here, the word aura can be interpreted to have a variety of meanings, one of which might be the moment’s potential spontaneity. Though the play Macbeth has been around for hundreds of years, each new actor will add something and each performance has the potential for surprise. Once something is a movie, however, it becomes solid. No matter how many times someone watches, it remains static; the aura of an instant’s ‘originality’ robbed. The Blair Witch Project attempts to regain this aura by presenting the work as fact. If an audience can accept the film as such, they can perceive it not as timeless, but as a salient moment trapped in time. The difference being the first can be viewed whenever at no expense to the movie’s meaning, whereas the second – a newly released news reel – would change the way we view the world now. We might perceive it to have an aura because (though mass produced) it can be placed in the immediate present, and so transforms our understanding of the universe that nothing after it can be the same. If The Blair Witch Project were, in fact, a documentary, Benjamin might be willing to argue its case. As it is not, we must conclude that it is only a failed attempt whose own nature forces it to fall short. The Blair Witch Project cannot have an aura as Benjamin would describe it, but mimics one skillfully enough to delude its audience – however briefly – into the illusion.

Further examining the 1999 film through the lens of Benjamin’s essay, we might look to how he compares magician with surgeon, saying that in art, painters are the former and magicians the latter. He claims, “The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web. There is a tremendous difference between the pictures they obtain. That of the painter is a total one, that of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law. Thus, for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art.” The Blair Witch Project is then entirely this highest form of art. Firstly, its medium is film and so it is inexplicably ‘true’ to reality in a way that even – say animated film – couldn’t be. Secondly, its fragmented presentation of reality allows for a sensation of near-entire “loss of equipment”. Because the clips are not complete, because the events are presented as real, because the characters themselves view life through the camera lens the viewer is asked – even more so than in a seamlessly cut film – to disengage and believe in the movie’s reality. Unlike in the matter of aura, the The Blair Witch Project’s falseness doesn’t disturb this effect. In fact, if anything, the fact that the “Project” isn’t real further compliments the piece as mechanically admirable art.

Though The Blair Witch Project may fail in its attempt to cut into Benjamin’s conception of aura – a blame which falls on form and fact, rather than execution – it does live up to his standards of modern, mechanized art in its innovative and engaging presentation.